Re: Elephants in the street. That happened in a city near me not too long ago. The circus was in town and the elephants (3) made a run for it. A woman awoke to an elephant in her yard, nibbling on her shrubs. She had to be quite insistent with the 911 operator to get a police response.

There were a few people wondering what they'd been drinking the night before as they drove past the elephants. I'm surprised there weren't a bunch of traffic collisions that morning.

This happened near where I used to live: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/27/national/27buffalo.html?_r=1 Made for a great picture, too. That must have been a fun 911 call, as well. "Uh, yeah, there are bison on the tennis court... No, I don't think they're playing tennis. Well, it doesn't *say* no bison, but it does say shirt and shoes required and they are *definitely* not wearing those."

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Emily is 10 years old! 1/07Jenny is 8 years old! 10/08Charlotte is 7 years old! 8/10Megan is 4 years old! 10/12Lydia is 2 years old! 12/14Baby Charlie expected 9/17

I can think of three scary things. One was natural, one was semi-natural and the other was not.

The first was a severe weather situation. Our apartment has a northern exposure and the buildings are low. From our dining table you can see the clouds moving in their normal west to east direction.

It was a grey day with rain. I alerted Mr. Thipu that the clouds were acting strangely. One bank was moving in the normal way. Further north, a second bank of clouds were moving from east to west.

The sky went green and then black. The noise became extremely loud. Yup, we had a tornado in the neighborhood. We were fine but there were a number of trees down and some damage to homes and cars a few blocks away. No one was seriously injured.

The second took place just up the block. Construction was going on for a group of townhouses. The week had been rainy and the day was rainy again. The rain let up for a bit and I went out to do some grocery shopping. I was stopped dead in my tracks.

The entire side of a three-story brick building beside the construction site had slid off. It was like looking into a doll house. No one was injured because everyone who lived there was either at work or at school.

Our neighborhood is normally very quiet. However, on the way to work one day, I hit a hostage situation with SWAT teams, right next to a school.

One of my coworkers came back to the office with some unusual pictures of a local drinking water pumphouse. It was a very windy day yesterday and a farmer's fence had blown down. Now, this would have been an unusual picture if the trespassers had been cows or sheep or goats. Nope, they were bison!

We have a law here that there can be no nutrient spreading within 100 m of a municipal drinking water supply well. The inspector for that area was ribbing the water superintendent that he was breaking the law.

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After cleaning out my Dad's house, I have this advice: If you haven't used it in a year, throw it out!!!!.

A landlady once told me about a house across the street from mine. The wife and husband had gone on vacation leaving their teenage son at home. One day, he set himself up in the top window of the house with his dad's gun like a sniper and was taking shots at the street. As far as I remember, no one was hurt (bad shot I guess?), but the city's police force came out with the big shields and had to take the house. It turned out that the son had gone off his meds in his parents' absence. The house was empty for a long time, but finally sold again.

Not in my neighborhood, but Honolulu had an elephant escape and you would not have wanted to be anywhere close enough to see that. If I recall correctly, the elephant's name was Tyke. He attacked his handler, who I believe died of his injuries. Then Tyke ran amok, he was on a rampage. He went after anything he saw moving. One guy was on the other side of a chain link fence, running away. The chain link fence slowed Tyke down a bit, not much, but enough for the guy to put rows of parked cars between him and the elephant.

Sadly, the incident ended when Tyke was shot several times and killed. I'm glad I didn't actually see Tyke escaping and I wish I hadn't seen the news showing it either.

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"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are."

A forum friend says that the ideal thing for deskunking some critter that's tangled with them is Biz and Simple Green. (Biz is a laundry detergent additive, Simple Green is a concentrated cleaning solution.)

I hadn't heard of that deskunker..

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I've never knitted anything I could recognize when it was finished. Actually, I've never finished anything, much to my family's relief.

One night we were awakened at midnight by the sound of helicopters and lights flashing on and off through our bedroom window. We looked outside, and there were two helicopters flying around the neighborhood with their lights ablaze. We then heard pounding on our front door, but we didn't answer it, because we didn't know what the heck was going on. It lasted for some time, but finally calmed down enough for us to go back to sleep.

It turned out that a guy had stolen a truck from the coke plant on Highway 4, then drove to the condos next to our development. He then went to the front door of one of the condos and shot through it, injuring a 4-year old girl. He then ditched the truck, and hid in our neighbor's house until they opened the roadblock the next morning.

That neighbor happened to be at his daughter's house and couldn't get through the roadblock the previous night. He waited until the roadblock was down and the first car he saw driving down the road was his SUV. The police chased the perp to Vallejo, where he crashed and totaled the SUV into a divider on Highway 80.

DH and I live about 2 1/2 hours away from Walt Disney World. We had a breakfast reservation one time, and were leaving home around 5:30. There is only 1 entrance / exit to our subdivision, and when we got to it, there were at least a half a dozen police cars parked with their lights on. A police officer stopped us and said some guy had been in the neighborhood around 3:00 am knocking on random doors, and had we heard anything? We told her that, no, we have 4 dogs, so if he had knocked on our door, we definitely would have noticed. She let us go on our way then.

Turns out, the guy's wife had left him (he'd gotten in trouble for domestic violence before) and gone to her mother's house. He didn't know exactly where the house was (I'm still not clear if this was even the correct neighborhood), so he was just pounding on random doors looking for his wife. Oh, and he was on drugs while he was doing this. We live in the back of the subdivision, so he didn't actually get to our street. But we have friends living on the main street whose next door neighbor's door was pounded on. The neighbors were smart and didn't open it.

The police ended up using a Taser on him when they got there, and he died a half hour later at the hospital. His mother sued the police and went on the news crying about what a good boy he was, and how he was afraid of the dark. Good boys don't beat up their wives, do drugs, and terrorize people trying to sleep at 3 am.

I think most of my stories come from childhood growing up in a small town of less than 7000 people. We lived on a highway leading into town.

Fireworks stand catching fire about 300 yards from our home. Awesome fireworks show for us kids and we got woken up at 1am and got to stay up to watch. As an adult, I know realize how dangerous it was for the firefighters.

Opening the door to a gentlemen who asked to use our phone. I told him strangers weren't allowed in and then he pointed to his armored truck parked in front of our home that was on fire. By the time the fire department arrived, the truck and the money was a goner.

Escaped convict captured in our neighbor's yard after trying to steel my dad's truck and then break into our house.

The coolest was finding two peacocks in our back yard. They had escaped from shipping company near our home. What my sister and I would have given for something like instagram back in 1975 because none of our friends believed us until we got the film developed a week later.

Well, there's two. One is the personally most dramatic. I'll give you the short version.

I'm home alone, probably about 13 or 14. Parents left cell phone in the car at dinner, grandma is out of town, sis is at friend's house for the night. Thunderstorm starts up, which is scary enough for me to begin with, but this was BEFORE the worst of my phobia. And probably a good reason for it in my mind. Lightning hits tree. Tree falls into power lines. Lightning goes through power lines into my house. All I know is that I heard a large *POP* from my bedroom and the power was out. I could smell smoke as I walked back to the hallway, but not too strong, but I have no phone service.

I scrawl a hasty note to my parents along the lines of I smelled smoke and couldn't call them, but I went to the neighbor's house, but not THIS neighbor, the other one, and when they came home I hope the house hadn't burned down because I was okay, but if the house did burn down then the whole message was somewhat useless. Ran to the neighbor's house and curled up on their living room floor hysterical.

Fast forward about 24 hours. Power company is replacing all the wires in the back from where the tree knocked them down. All the houses on the street have power! Except ours. We get one of the foremen into our house to take a look. Our fuse box, the solid metal box has two holes burned in it. One where the lightning came in, one where it left. There were droplets of metal around the holes, where it had been sprayed out as MOLTEN METAL! There's still a singed spot on my old bedroom floor, and the power strip it arced up through was toast, but someone was watching out for me that night, because NOTHING caught fire. But to have five power cars all parked around our house looking at this fuse box was kind of dramatic.